Opinion Contributor

Helping Mark Sanford turn it around

'We believed this race was a very long shot' for Sanford, the authors write. | AP Photo

By HEATHER R. HIGGINS and WILLIAM W. PASCOE III | 5/8/13 1:17 PM EDT

Mark Sanford’s remarkable victory Tuesday night over Elizabeth Colbert Busch in the special election in South Carolina’s First Congressional District marked a tremendous comeback against long odds.

Colbert Busch had outraised Sanford by roughly $1.4 million to $1 million, a gap that was radically widened by roughly $1 million in spending by her party and assorted PACs, particularly the liberal House Majority PAC. Against that, Sanford had only one outside group assisting him at any significant scale, and that came just in the last week of the campaign – our organization, Independent Women’s Voice.

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This wasn’t a race we had planned to become involved in, even though Sanford had signed our Repeal Pledge on Obamacare (which includes de-funding it and slowing implementation however possible), and Busch, unsurprisingly, had not.

But when, three weeks prior to the election, the news broke that Sanford’s ex-wife had filed a complaint that he had repeatedly trespassed onto her property in contravention of their divorce settlement, the NRCC announced it would have nothing more to do with the race, and what should have been a reliably anti-Obamacare House vote was put at risk.

Five days later, Public Policy Polling reported that Sanford’s standing had dropped precipitously and that he trailed Busch by 50-41 percent despite it being a heavily Republican district that had voted for Mitt Romney by 18 points. According to the survey, it appeared Republicans and Independents had had it and simply did not want to vote for Sanford.

We were concerned about the possibility of a Colbert Busch victory on several levels:

• In the short term, there will be extremely important budget and policy votes this year, particularly on Obamacare, and each vote will count.

• Medium term, we were concerned about the psychological/morale aspect of a Colbert Busch victory – the left wouldn’t say, “awe shucks, it’s just that they had a flawed candidate.” Instead, they would have crowed that they just defeated a former governor of a very Republican state and proclaimed continued mandates and momentum from 2012. And that classic “special election momentum” would come at just the time when the national party committees are focusing on recruiting for the crucial 2014 midterms: a Sanford loss could have made liberal efforts to recruit good candidates easier, and made conservative efforts to recruit good candidates harder.

• Longer term, we were not so convinced that once elected, Colbert Busch would be easy to beat in 2014. However conservative the district, a woman who comes across as moderate, has local celebrity, and is buttressed by lots of money won’t be quite as easy to dislodge as conventional wisdom seemed to think. Case in point: special-election victor Rep. Carolyn McCarthy (D-N.Y.), who had far fewer qualifications than Colbert Busch, and was supposed to be easily beaten, has held her putatively Republican seat for twenty years now. It seemed a far better option to try to beat Sanford in a 2014 primary, should that be warranted, than try to defeat her in a general election.

• Strategically, and particularly after our frustrating inability in 2012 to persuade Republican campaigns or any of the large aggregating outside groups to use Obamacare as an issue against liberals, we wanted to see if the health law remained as powerful an issue as we believe it continues to be.